Orson Scott Card
American author working in numerous genres.
I will not be tamed, only persuaded. I will not be coerced or led blindly or tricked or bullied - I am willing only to be convinced. If you don't trust your own basic goodness enough to tell me what you're trying to do... Then you're confessing your own moral weakness and I'll never serve you.
It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.
Don't you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?
Law can change how people behave when others are watching — that's all.
Why give you answers you wont believe?
Well, answers I don't believe would be a step forward.
He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.
Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too.
Perhaps you don’t desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you.
"I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature," he said, irritated at my failure to respond.
"Nature's virtue is intact," I reassured him. "I just know some different laws."
Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?
Will I be coming to you as husband or a child? A partner or a student?
I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right.
He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more.
How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?
We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be.
When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.
Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while.
Out of respect for custom he treats me as if all women were equally worthless. He gives custom more respect than he gives me.
He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.
I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be, Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are, and go ahead and LEAD.